“The Royal Society of Chemistry is concerned about the way that the UK’s primary science funding body for chemistry is introducing new measures which have resulted in anger in parts of the chemistry community.

The RSC said that chemists in the UK could find it difficult to continue with research, and that young up-and-coming scientists may find it difficult to establish their research careers.

University departments could have to close as a result of the EPSRC’s decision, says organic chemist Karl Hale. If universities find that a significant number of their scientists have been blacklisted, they will effectively have to shut down due to lack of funding.

David Reid, head of communications at the EPSRC, responded to the critics:

“We’re facing a 3% to 5% shortfall in funding available for blue-skies research.

“A small number of people put a disproportionate burden on the peer-review system. We’re talking about weeding out consistently low-quality proposals.

“Chemists have a culture of putting in lots of short, small proposals to us. We would like to see chemists be more ambitious in their proposals and work hard on one or two bigger proposals in a year.”

In other words, grant money is tight in our credit-crunched age, and the EPSRC staff have had enough of being tied up processing all the applications they get. I don’t think this is the solution to their problem though, as it will only serve to hurt science.